How badly did the much-heralded Microsoft Surface RT fail? So badly that Microsoft’s CEO gave a mea culpa on stage.

Steve Ballmer told attendees during an internal town hall, “We built a few more devices than we could sell,” which is Microsoft-speak for a collective facepalm at Redmond. Ballmer went on to say “we’re not selling as many Windows devices as we want to.”

The Surface family, which was one of Microsoft’s first forays into producing their own hardware outside of the Xbox line, was supposed to turn MSFT into a major tablet player. Instead, Surface has been hobbled by software issues and complaints about the much-heralded keyboards.